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GUEST REVIEW: DIXON ON MCCABE AND REED

As Mark Ford’s
2012 anthology London: A History in Verseamply demonstrates, poetry depicting or set in London is one of the richest
veins in our tradition, from Langland and Chaucer through Keats and Blake to TS
Eliot and – in more recent times – David Gascoyne,Rosemary Tonks and Iain
Sinclair. As well as the celebratory pomp of Dunbar’s ‘To the City of London’
or Wordsworth’s ‘Composed on Westminster Bridge’, there have always been politically-oriented
poems intent on unearthing the more scabrous aspects of metropolitan society
and the radical disparities of economic circumstance it throws up – the medieval
‘London Lickpenny’, for example, Samuel Johnson’s Juvenalian satire ‘London’ , Blake’s
Song of Experience of the same name or Douglas Oliver’s counter-Thatcherite
‘The Infant and the Pearl’.

Whitehall Jackals by Chris McCabe and
Jeremy Reed arrives with such an overwritten blurb – this “gritty riposte
performs an angry and elegant resistance” to the “dystopian backdrop” of the
city’s “smut and glitter” – the book seems pre-aligned to carve out a niche
within this dissenting tradition. It
feels less a “psychogeographic collaboration”, however, than a two-hander, dual
intercutting monologues rather than a dialogue, since we are given alternating sets
of poems both with a slanted, peripatetic focus on London locales but each with
their own itinerary, register and themes. This sense of a double-act bouncing
off each other rather than co-composing- Reed’s camply bohemian flâneur
against McCabe’s dourer, pithier straight-man – is energising in fact, the
friction and interplay of the two voices making for a perhaps more dynamic read
than if either poet had attempted a whole collection of such cityscapes. (“Psychogeography”
has become such a loosely-employed term as to be all but meaningless these
days; or at least since Will Self decided that going for walks and writing
about them justified him calling a newspaper-column Pyschogeography, as though the whole concept had begun and ended
with himself.)

Reversing
the expected age-polarity, the now 62-year old Reed’s is the racier, more skittish
idiom whereas the younger Mc Cabe pursues a rather more reflective and observant
methodology endowed with a sense of sieving residues from the linguistic
effluvia of metropolitan life, incorporating glimpsed signage, found-text and
eavesdropped conversation into the mix. His is the more concerted endeavour to
point up and defamiliarise features of the urban environment which embody
baleful political influences and infringements, in particular delineating with
grim dismay the effects of gentrification on the Docklands area in a sequential
mapping that takes in Wapping, St Katherine’s Dock, the Thames Path,
Rotherhithe, Bermondsey and Cherry Garden Pier.

McCabe’s
deployment of prose-poems (perhaps distant relatives of Rimbaud’s London-set Illuminations) is especially effective in
allowing vividly descriptive imagery and caustic speech-rhythms to combine
forces in tracing the enterprise-driven dereliction of historical deposits
which now characterises this riverside stretch. ‘The Thames Path’, for example,
is said to be “a creation myth for the sale of leisure, a crippled thoroughfare
of urban build latched at late-notice against the river”, whereas at ‘St
Saviour’s Dock, Bermondsey’, the refuse exposed by a muddy high-tide – “buckets,
packets, tickets...a wellington, a torn boot – mould spores clinging to their
soles” – is set in bleak contrast to Canary Wharf and Canada Square towering
above them, leaving the poem to question “where the river’s drive for commerce
failed & where the tapering for the stars will end”.

Primarily
a denizen of Soho and the West End, Jeremy Reed seems more intent on sketching
his own self-dramatising autobiography onto the streets and cafes he frequents,
in a restless odyssey for poetic valorisation that recalls Stephen Dedalus’s in
Ulysses: “meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men,
wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting (himself)”. In a scene now
largely dominated by poets too pedestrian and career-minded to deviate far from
the accepted gamut of styles they absorbed on their Creative Writing MAs, we
are no doubt in need of exuberant mavericks like Reed, still in thrall to the
Romanticist notion that “there’s no separation between the individual and the
work” and that (to paraphrase the poem ‘London Flowers) everything he sees and
does is poetry waiting to be written down. But although Reed’s language does
still have a “zingy chutzpah” when compared to many feted poets half his age
–the riffs of brand-names and serial-numbers often giving it what he calls a
“crunched energy” - when reading him at
length and coming across the marked repetition of vocabulary, cadence and
metaphor that is a feature of these rapidly-fired-off poems one is reminded of
Mallarme’s advice to Degas to the effect that ultimately a poem is made of
words, not ideas or experiences.

Where
Reed is most compelling is when he is able to marshal his scattershot flow into
florid reimaginings of London history viewed from the perspective of a
street-aesthete more interested in pop-culture than in museum artifacts. In
‘Ham Yard W1’–the prose-poem form lending
itself to Reed’s urban annotations as appropriately as it does to McCabe’s – an
apocryphal countercultural lineage is tracked from 18th century
highwaymen through jazz and skiffle clubs to the RnB/Mod explosion of the 60s,
culminating in a brilliantly-evocative scenario of Mick Jagger and the Stones
performing at the Scene in ’64. Its companion-piece ‘Mods, Hoodlums,
Guttersnipes, Punks’ continues the mythology through Marc Bolan’s early guise
as an androgynous Mod from Stamford Hill, David Bowie’s Soho-fuelled
transformation into Ziggy Stardust, Ray Davies as “dandified” London lyric-poet
and John Lydon and the Sex Pistols gigging at the 100 club in 1977. This is
edgy, vibrant musicology, where Reed’s intimate knowledge and enthusiasm for
his subject-matter shine ebulliently through: a whole book of such charged
prose-poems would create a highly original alternative history of pop and
rock’s evolution.

If
McCabe’s mordant deconstructions of the gentrifying tendencies of Coalition-lead
London are powerfully resonant, Reed’s directly political poems seem to me less
successful. The book’s title arose (he says in the Introduction) out of “mutual
disgust with Tony Blair’s war atrocities in Iraq” and the project was “quickly
activated in January 2011”: yet Blair’s invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003 and
by 2011 he hadn’t been part of the Government for 4 years, serving (ironically)
as Peace Envoy to the Middle East, so it is unlikely he would have spent much
time in Whitehall when the book was being written. Again according to its
Introduction, the book is intended as a “defiantly-intransigent leftfield indie
whack against the city’s towers” but if this is the case, surely vitriolic
broadsides depicting Blair as “a psychopathic jackal” and a “hipster-suited super-killer”
seem to be venting their spleen at the wrong target, or at the right target
some years too late. Instead, surely the satirical contumely of poets
attempting to uncover what’s gone wrong with London should have turned their
attention to the real architects of the cultural degeneration of our city and
its transformation into a heritage theme-park “playground for plutocrats”:
Cameron, Osborne and Boris Johnson, the real jackals within Whitehall, none of
whom are mentioned in the book.

Oliver Dixon is a poet, writer and critic who
lives in London. First book of poems Human Form was published in 2013 by Penned
in the Margins. Poems and reviews have appeared in the Sunday Times, the
Forward Book of Poetry 2014, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Tears in the Fence,
The Wolf and other places. His day-job is as a college lecturer working
with students with learning disabilities. He blogs at Ictus.

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